Mooring ‘super-diversity’ to a brutal migration milieu

The migration milieu in which ‘super-diversity’ locates is not a crisis of human mobility, but the crisis of political imagination to engage with mobility as integral to twenty-first century citizenship. The migration milieu of Western capitalism actively requires and refutes the migrant, making a volatile life-world of migration in public discourse, policy and everyday life. Rather than focus on the current conceptual reach of super-diversity, my paper directly engages with whether super-diversity has explanatory cogency for this brutal migration milieu. Vertovec’s original outline of super-diversity points to accelerated migrations in which the elaboration of borders and circumventions have become ‘more multiple’, ‘more stratified’ (Vertovec 2007). While migration processes have discernible scale, breadth and pace, I argue that it is the milieu of history, atmosphere and ideology that is formative. My aim is to relate processes of diversitymaking to the punitive effects of the Europea